Before answering Martin Nicolaus’s
critique of
Where is America going?, the origins and intended
function of that article should be explained. It is the
transcript of a speech given to a seminar of Finnish students at
Helsinki, in the framework of a symposium on American
imperialism today. It was not intended to be a global
analysis of the contradictions of American imperialism, still
less a broad outline of American or world perspectives, in the
coming decades. I do not consider myself an expert on US
capitalism; there are Marxists who are much better equipped to
tackle such an analysis, among them close friends of mine in the
USA. It is sufficient to recall the origin of this transcribed
speech to understand the limitations of the subject with which
it dealt, arising out of the needs of an elementary division of
labour. Other speakers, in the first place Perry Anderson, dealt
at that same symposium with the phenomenon of American
imperialism, its industrial-financial-military infrastructure
and its repercussions at home and abroad. To myself fell the
task of outlining trends inside American society which were
slowly eroding its previous relative social and political
stability. It was taken for granted that the worldwide activity
of American imperialism, and its contradictions, had been
analysed by previous speakers and assimilated by the audience.
For this reason I mentioned them only in passing.
[1] Surely, even the
harshest critic could not believe that I ‘underestimate’ the
stupendous effects of the Vietnamese war on social political and
ideological developments in the USA.
What was the political purpose of my speech? It was,
obviously, to oppose the fallacies of that ‘Third Worldism’
which, from Franz Fanon and Lin Piao to Baran and Sweezy’s
Monopoly Capital and Herbert Marcuse’s
One-Dimensional Man, writes the American working class
off any medium-term revolutionary perspective.
[2] It is clear that only
the most mechanistic and undialectical ‘marxists’ would deny
that the national liberation movements in colonial and
semi-colonial countries, and their potential development into
socialist revolutions (under adequate proletarian leadership),
are part and parcel of the process of world revolution as it has
unfolded for 40 years, since the second Chinese revolution of
1925–27. [3] This mean that
the inter-relationship between the colonial revolution and the
socialist revolution in the West (as well as the
inter-relationship between the colonial revolution and the
political anti-bureaucratic revolution in the so-called
socialist countries) is complex and manifold.
The difference between revolutionary Marxists and supporters
of ‘Third Worldism’ does not lie in the fact the first deny this
inter-relationship and the second uphold it. It lies in two
basically distinct approaches to the nature of that
inter-relationship. Revolutionary Marxists do not believe in a
fatal time-sequence, whereas ‘Third Worldists’ do believe that
imperialism has first to be overthrown in all, or the most
important underdeveloped countries, before socialist revolution
is on the agenda again in the West. Lin Piao’s famous thesis
that the ‘countryside’ will have to ‘encircle the cities’ is the
most striking expression of this idea. Revolutionary Marxists do
not believe that the loss of an important or even a decisive
part of foreign colonial domains will automatically create a
revolutionary situation inside the imperialist countries; they
believe that these losses will only have revolutionary effects
if they first trigger off internal material changes inside
imperialist society itself. Between world politics and
revolution in the West there is a necessary mediation: changes
in the function of the economy, changes in the relationship of
forces between classes, changes in the consciousness and
militancy of different social groups.
It is now possible to clear up a misunderstanding which
permeates all of Nicolaus’s critique. When I spoke of ‘internal’
developments as against ‘external effects’ upon US society, I
did not have a geographical but a social context in mind. The
very argument which Nicolaus attacks most strongly – our thesis
that inter-imperialist competition is already and will be
increasingly one of the forces upsetting the relative internal
stability of US imperialism – should have shown him this. After
all, ‘geographically’, competition from Western European and
Japanese imperialism is not an ‘internal’ but an ‘external’
factor in the USA. Why did I treat it the way I did? Because I
was looking for effects of world developments on social forces,
on classes and layers inside imperialist society. Without this
necessary mediation, historical materialism ceases to be a
‘guide to action’ and becomes an empty economism and fatalism.
1. The Universal Contradiction and Concrete Class Struggle
From this point of view, to speak of the world as one
society, as one single framework for political action, is an
impermissible metaphysical abstraction. It is quite true that
imperialism has woven all countries and societies of the world
into a single net of world market and world exploitation (with
the exception of those countries which, through a socialist
revolution, have been able to break out of this net). It is also
true that monopoly capital of the imperialist countries exploits
in various forms and to various extents the workers of ‘its own
country’; workers of foreign imperialist countries where it
invests capital; workers of underdeveloped countries; poor and
middle peasants of these same countries; peasants and artisans
of ‘its own country’; nonmonopolized sectors of the capitalist
class of ‘its own’ and foreign imperialist countries; and
practically the whole ruling class of underdeveloped countries.
But to draw from this the conclusion that the differences in
form and degree of this exploitation have become secondary and
insignificant or to argue that because exploitation is universal,
it is also homogeneous, is to have a completely lopsided view of
world reality under imperialism, yesterday as well as to-day,
and to open the road to disastrous analytical and political
mistakes.
The historical specificity of imperialism in this respect
lies in the fact that although it unites the world economy into
a single world market, it does not unify world society into a
homogeneous capitalist milieu. Although monopoly capital
succeeds in extracting super-profits, directly or indirectly,
out of most of the people on earth, it does not transform most
people in the world into industrial producers of surplus-value.
In short: although it submits all classes and all nations (except
those which have broken out of its realm) to various forms of
common exploitation, it maintains and strengthens to the utmost
the differences between these societies. Although the United
States and India are more closely interwoven today than at any
time in the past, the distance which separates their technology,
their life-expectancy, their average culture, the way of living
and of working of their inhabitants, is much wider today than it
was a century ago, when there were hardly any relations at all
between these two countries.
Only if we understand that imperialism brings to its widest
possible application the universal law of uneven and combined
development, can we understand world history in the 20th century.
Only if we understand this law of uneven and combined
development can we understand why, because of an integrated
world market, the first victorious socialist revolutions could
break out in three underdeveloped backward countries, Russia,
Yugoslavia and China. Only if we understand how this same law
continues to operate today can we understand that the decisive
battle for world socialism can only be fought by the German,
British, Japanese, French, Italian and American workers.
‘In this day and age of imperialism, more than in any
previous epoch, the contradiction between labour and capital
emerges in a universal form. The days when it was possible for
that contradiction to show itself only within a national ...
sphere, are far behind us,’ writes Martin Nicolaus. Permit me to
point out the mistake in the first sentence, and the
non-sequitur of the second one. The contradiction between labour
and capital emerged in a universal form, tendentially from the
beginning of the capitalist mode of production (see in this
respect the significant passages of Marx’s Grundrisse,
well-known to Martin Nicolaus), and factually from the beginning
of the age of imperialism, more than three-quarters of a century
ago. In that sense, neither the Russian Revolution, nor the
Spanish Revolution, nor the Chinese Revolution (to cite two
victories and one defeat) were any more ‘national’ than the
Vietnamese Revolution; all of them were both expressions and
focal points of the ‘universal contradiction’, which did not
manifest itself only ‘in this day and age’. But to conclude from
the universal character of class contradictions to the necessary
universal form of class struggle is to presume immediate and
total correspondence between objective socio-economic
developments and human action, i.e. to eliminate from the
picture the whole problem of national pecularities, political
forms, social relationship of forces, varieties of consciousness
and rôle of organizations, in other words, Lenin, Trotsky,
Luxemburg and a lot of Marx and Engels too!
Polemicizing with Bukharin precisely on this subject, Lenin
had this to say during the 8th Congress of the Russian Communist
Party:
‘In order to understand in what situation we find
outselves, it is necessary to say how we marched, and what
led us to the socialist revolution. It is imperialism which
led us to it, it is (also) capitalism in its primitive forms
of (simple) commodity economy. It is necessary to understand
all this, for only if we take reality into consideration,
will we be able to solve questions like, for instance, that
of our attitude towards the middle peasants. In fact, whence
did this middle peasant arise in the epoch of a purely
imperialist capitalism? For he didn’t even exist in the
properly speaking capitalist countries. If we connect the
question of our attitude towards this nearly medieval
phenomenon of the middle peasantry exclusively to the point
of view of imperialism and of the dictatorship of the
proletariat, we shall never arrive at making ends meet, and
we shall only get bruises and bumps. If, on the contrary, we
have to change our attitude with regard to the middle
peasant, please make the effort to say, in the theoretical
part of the programme, whence he arises and what he is. He
is a petty commodity producer. This is the ABC of capitalism
which we have to state, because we have not yet got out of
it.’ [4]
Lenin summarizes his position by stating that ‘imperialism is
a superstructure of capitalism’, and when it crumbles, the whole
capitalist foundation still subsists. Imperialism, in other
words, is a combined form of social development, locking
together the most backward and the most modern forms of economic
activity, exploitation and sociopolitical life, in variable
forms, in different countries. For that reason, socialist world
revolution, under imperialism, cannot be an instantaneous,
simultaneous, synchronized event in all or most countries of the
world. It can only be a process in which the imperialist chain
is broken first in its weakest links. In order to determine what
link is the weakest in each determinate phase of development, it
is necessary precisely to study the economic, social, political,
cultural, historical differences between various countries – in
the last analysis: the different correlations of socio-political
forces in these countries – which survive in spite of the
‘universal form of contradiction between labour and capital’.
2. Class Consciousness and Socio-Economic Contradictions
Martin Nicolaus writes: ‘There are no more “local”
contradictions, and no more “economic” contradictions in the
sense that is usually meant; all our contradictions and the
deeper they are, the truer this is, have universal causes and
universal effects; one baby in one room in one town who cries
from hunger throws the entire history of the world into question.’
This is quite true, and nicely said. It is not new, for it was
true also a century ago. But it begs the real question. For the
question which I was discussing, the point of view against which
Nicolaus polemicizes is not whether the world economy has
objectively been united and ‘socialized’ (this is ABC for
Marxists, and I have myself written this dozens of times). The
question which I was asking is this: when, why and how will the
great majority of the American working class (the white working
class) revolt against all these infants crying >from hunger in
the world, and will stop that hunger by making a socialist
revolution.
To refer us back, in answer to that question, to the
objective causal relations, is misleading. After all, infants
have been crying for many decades, and have not American workers
let them cry? Have not most of the American New Left argued,
till very recently, that the American working class would never
revolt against capitalism, for various reasons (because it was ‘corrupted’;
because it was ‘integrated’; because of the ‘mass media’;
because of its ‘lack of revolutionary tradition’)? Nicolaus
should admit that even for somebody who agrees entirely that
capitalist exploitation and alienation have ‘universal causes
and universal effects’, this question has still to be answered,
by something more than mere pious incantations (‘When (!) this
contradiction finally comes home to roost ...’) or blind faith.
Now in the history of the world socialist movement, there are
only three fundamental answers to this question. One is the
answer given by utopian socialists, and various propaganda sects
of very different colours and origins, who all agree on one
basic point: that the working class (or mankind for that matter)
will never move towards socialism as long as it has not ‘seen
the light’ – i.e. let itself be persuaded by the particular
creed of the particular sect in question. The second answer,
diametrically opposed but parallel to the first one (and as
fundamentally wrong) is that ‘when objective conditions are ripe’
(when ‘the productive forces have ceased to grow’; or when
‘misery has become unbearable’; there are many variations of
fatalism), the ‘workers will become socialists’ and ‘make a
revolution’. The third and correct answer, that of the classical
socialist movement, perfected by Lenin, says that workers will
make a revolution when (a) socialist consciousness has been
introduced in their midst by an organized vanguard; (b) this
consciousness merges with a growing militancy of the whole class,
which is a function of growing social contradictions, and (c)
that militancy emerges into an objective situation of sudden and
extreme instability of the ruling class (a ‘pre-revolutionary
situation’, a ‘revolutionary crisis’).
Attempts to introduce socialist consciousness into the
American working class have been manifold and uninterrupted for
a century now. Sometimes they were broader, sometimes they were
more limited; sometimes they were effective and sometimes
miserably inadequate, but they never ceased. What has obviously
declined since the period of the great upsurge of the cio and
the sit-down strikes (or, if one prefers, since the postwar
strike wave) is the militancy of the American working class,
i.e. the objective class struggle itself. In order not to
stumble into the dual pitfalls of utopianism and fatalism, one
has to ask the question: what factors could determine a new rise
of proletarian class militancy and struggle, after more than two
decades of relative quiescence in the USA?
[5] What factors are already
upsetting and will increasingly upset the relative social and
political equilibrium which the American capitalist class
enjoyed between the Second World War and the mid-sixties?
When we examine the question of the relative quiescence of
the working class in the richest imperialist country of the
world, we have at least to take that basic fact into
consideration. It cannot be an accident that the leading
imperialist country has the weakest development of socialist
class consciousness in the working class. The precedent which
inevitably leaps to the mind is that of 19th century Britain.
The comments of Engels and of Lenin on that situation are
well-known. It may be useful to reproduce Engels’ opinion in
full, in order to examine whether there is an analogy between
the English situation of that time and the US situation to-day:
‘As long as England’s industrial monopoly lasted, the
English working class has participated to a certain degree
in the benefits of that monopoly. These benefits have been
divided among it in a very unequal way; the privileged
minority appropriated the largest part, but even the great
mass received at least temporarily sometimes its part. That
is the reason why there has been no socialism in England
since the withering away of Owenism. With the collapse of
the monopoly, the English working class will lose this
privileged position. It will find itself one day reduced –
including the privileged and leading minority – to the same
level as their working colleagues of foreign countries. That
is the reason why there will again be socialism in England.’
[6]
‘Industrial monopoly’ means of course a monopoly in advanced
industrial productivity of labour; there was no absolute
industrial monopoly of Britain, either in 1885 or even in 1845.
Once we refine Engels’ reasoning in this sense, the analogy with
the situation of the USA since the Second World War is evident.
It is hard to deny that American workers ‘participated to a
certain degree’ in the benefits of US imperialism’s monopoly of
advanced industrial productivity (technology). It is even harder
for a Marxist to deny that there is at least a partial causal
link between this participation – i.e. the fact that the
American working class enjoys the highest standard of living of
the world proletariat – and the absence of socialist class
consciousness of that same class.
Now when Martin Nicolaus himself examines the probable causes
for the ‘re-emergence of the contradiction between capital and
labour’ in the United States, he enumerates 14 factors, no less
than 10 of which are of a subjective nature, i.e. concern
phenomena of superstructure, and are therefore obviously begging
the question. To give only one example: why should growing
involvement of conscripted young soldiers in reactionary wars
abroad automatically lead to an opposition of a socialist
nature? Were not these soldiers also conscripted during the
Korean War? Did this involvement lead to a powerful socialist
mass movement of soldiers, to a rise of proletarian class
consciousness of the American working class? Of the four
remaining factors, only two, the growing industrialization of
the South and the rapid decline of the farmers, are objective
processes which change relations of forces to the advantage of
the proletariat, but which do not lead directly to increasing
socialist class consciousness either. So there only remain two
basic factors on which Nicolaus can count fundamentally to upset
the relative social and political quiescence of the white
proletariat in the USA: ‘absolute impoverishment’ and increasing
insecurity and instability of employment.
But these two factors suddenly fall from the sky, completely
unrelated to the economic analysis which preceeds them. They are
even in opposition to the main thesis of Nicolaus’s article,
i.e. the thesis that the absolute superiority of US imperialism
in the capitalist world is growing, and not declining. Surely,
if this were so, monopolist super-profits flowing to US capital
would increase and not decrease – and its capacity to ‘corrupt’
the American working class would grow, and not decline. Surely,
if US imperialism were all-powerful in the realm of
international capital, it would endeavour to ‘export’
instability of employment first to its weaker competitors, and
unemployment would consequently be lower in USA than in, say,
Germany, Britain and Japan.
Nicolaus speaks darkly about ‘an import of colonial
conditions into the US metropolis’, and ‘a process of
intensification of all exploitation, of reduction of all labour
to the status of colonial labour’. Let us leave aside the
obvious exaggeration and over-simplification contained in this
sentence: long before the American working class saw its
standard of living depressed to the level of ‘colonial labour’,
it would undoubtedly be ready to make a socialist revolution!
What is missing in this sentence, and in the reasoning based
upon it which involves all the ‘fourteen points’, is the
socio-economic rationale of US monopolists’ behaviour. After all,
they do not ‘intensify exploitation’ out of sheer wickedness, or
because they are secretly conspiring to make America ripe for
communism. If, after having enjoyed for three decades a
situation of relative political and social stability in their
country, these monopolists suddenly act in a way to upset that
equilibrium, one cannot seriously assume that they do this
without being compelled to act in that sense. Now what compels
them to behave in that way? Once we formulate that question, we
are happily back where we started in the first place – and where
Nicolaus assumed lightmindedly we should not have started: the
specific inner contradictions of US imperialism in a given span
of time, i.e. in the new phase of postwar development opened up
somewhere around 1965 and not the ‘universal contradiction
between capital and labour, or the ‘general contradictions of
the epoch of imperialism’.
3. The Laws of Motion of Capitalism in This Century
There is only one basic driving force which compels capital
in general to step up capital accumulation, extraction of
surplus value and exploitation of labour, and feverishly to look
for profits, over and above average profit: this is competition.
It is true that there is not only competition between
capitalists, but also competition between capital and labour as
well, i.e. the attempt of capitalists to replace living labour
by ‘labour-saving’ equipment, whenever there is full employment
and the rate of exploitation (of surplus-value) starts to
decline as a result of a more favourable relationship of forces
between wage-labour and employers. But capitalists’ attempts to
stop this decline in the rate of surplus-value is again not
caused by their fundamentally ‘evil’ or ‘anti-labour’ character,
but by the compulsion of competition. If they let labour get
away with ‘excessive’ wage increases, their own rate of capital
accumulation will decline, they will fall behind in the
competitive race and be unable to introduce the most modern
technology and finally be destroyed by their competitors.
Today’s world is no longer a ‘purely’ capitalist world, and
politicalmilitary considerations have played an important rôle
in motivating some of the key decisions of US imperialism during
the last decades. Imperialism feels threatened by the spread of
social revolution and wants to stop it by all means, including
open warfare as in Korea and Vietnam. On the other hand, a
purely politico-military explanation of the world involvement of
US imperialism misses two important economic points: first, that
the very nature of capital accumulation, under monopoly
capitalism even more than under ‘laissez-faire’ capitalism,
creates an economic compulsion to world-wide expansion for
capital; second, that the emergence of a capital surplus,
inevitably linked with monopoly capitalism itself in the leading
imperialist nations, creates a strong economic compulsion for
building up a powerful arms industry and military establishment.
The existence of noncapitalist states and of a powerful
revolutionary upsurge in the colonial world gave these processes
a specific form; but in themselves, they existed before the
Second World War, and before the October revolution at that.
Two questions related to our subject arise from this summary
repetition of some of the basic origins and features of
imperialism. What are the effects of international capital
accumulation upon imperialist competition and rivalry, under the
specific circumstances of present-day world developments? What
are their effects on class relations inside the USA?
The answer to the first question can be read in all
statistics relative to basic international capital movements
since the end of the Second World War. For 20 years now, capital
export has been larger and more powerful than ever before, but
it has been flowing primarily between imperialist countries, and
not from imperialist to under-developed countries.
[7] The worldwide upsurge of
liberation movements in the colonial and semi-colonial countries
has created a risk of loss of capital, which apparently more
than offsets the still higher rate of profit which foreign
capital enjoys in these countries.
[8] Inasmuch as the world
domain of imperialism has been shrinking and not expanding, such
a powerful international flow of capital, and in general the
stepping up of capital accumulation during the past two decades
(or, what is the same thing under capitalism, the higher rate of
economic growth) could only lead to an intensification of
competition, as well as to its necessary corollary, an
intensification of capital concentration. The emergence of the
‘multinational corporation’, as the leading form of organization
of monopoly capitalism to-day, testifies both to stronger
international competition and greater international
concentration of capital.
The answer to the second question is less obvious and more
controversial. But the inner logic of capitalism leads us to the
inescapable conclusion that as long as competition clearly and
unilaterally operates in favour of US imperialism, it can
neither threaten the standard of living of the working class,
not shatter the relative stability of employment. It is just not
true to write, as Nicolaus does: ‘Short of a general Soviet
capitulation to capitalist investment-penetration, and short of
collapse of the Chinese revolution, both improbable, capitalism
has reached its limits and has no place to go but inward, in the
direction of greater intensification of all exploitation within
its boundaries.’ Nicolaus, after seeming to forget that ‘the
Third World has been thoroughly penetrated’ not just since 1965
or 1945, but since 1900; after seeming to forget that this
penetration is still far from complete, however, and that even
in imperialist countries, there is even today a powerful
movement of ‘industrialization’ going on, is carried away by his
manipulation of the abstraction ‘capitalism’, and loses sight of
the most important form of expansion of imperialist powers since
the beginning of this century: their attempt to expand at the
expense of their competitors. After all, that is why two World
Wars have broken out, and why the history of the 20th century
has been what it is.
Thus US monopolists would much sooner conquer their
competitors’ markets and undermine employment there, than to
have huge overproduction and unemployment inside the USA. If a
point is reached where the US is forced to intensify
exploitation of American workers, it can only be because this
alternative course of action is being increasingly closed to it.
Yet this again can only be explained because the correlation of
competitive forces has become such that ‘export’ of intensified
exploitation is increasingly impossible.
Nicolaus introduces a few additional facts to explain the
need of intensified exploitation of American workers by reasons
other than those emanating from increased international
competition. He mentions inflation and taxation.
[9] But here again, he is
begging the question. Inflation has been present in the USA
since the mid-’thirties. Why hasn’t it prevented a rise of the
standard of living of the American workers, before it started to
lead to a decline? Taxation has been steadily increasing for a
long time; why has it had to be stepped up the the point where
it starts cutting down real wages? Surely these two questions
are interrelated, aren’t they? Surely the pressure of foreign
imperialists to cut down the deficit of the US balance of
payments has something to do with them? Surely the relative
decline of the competitive position of US imperialism is
expressed in the fact that, whereas for a whole period
(including that of the Korean war) US imperialism could pay
itself the luxury of a large deficit in its balance of payments,
a huge military establishment, and large-scale military and
economic outlays abroad, while keeping a strongly positive trade
account, today the mutual effects of inflation at home and
military outlays abroad have reduced the trade surplus to the
point where it might disappear altogether?
Nicolaus correctly mentions the rising ‘cost of maintaining
the existing boundaries of the capitalist world’, and the rising
trend to ‘socialize’ (i.e. impose upon the backs of the American
workers) the costs of interventions and wars abroad. But he
forgets that again we are dealing here with relative and not
with absolute aggregates. An imperialist country can have a
rising military budget and a rising cost of living, while at the
same time real capital accumulation and real income of the
workers are still increasing instead of being reduced (this
happened in the early forties, the early ’fifties and the early
’sixties in the USA). What is needed for this conjunction is a
rise in real output and national income making possible all
these increases simultaneously. Only if the rate of economic
growth declines (or the rate of inflation and military outlays
increases in a much greater proportion than real output) does
military intervention abroad imply increased exploitation of
workers at home. This again depends on how the capitalist world
economy behaves, and what share of its international market
accrues to US imperialism. Even with a stagnant world market,
increased military outlays in the USA do not automatically mean
a declining standard of living for American workers, as long as
US imperialism has the possibility of receiving a growing share
of that market, at the expense of its competitors. By
eliminating inter-imperialist competition, Nicolaus takes all
logic out of his assessment of increasing exploitation of the
American working class.
4. Back to the Fallacy of Ultra-Imperialism?
In order to deny any major role for inter-imperialist
competitions today, Martin Nicolaus has to contend:
- that ‘from the viewpoint of the major corporations in
industry and finance, national boundaries have long ceased
to be obstacles ... They naturally resist the pressures
toward protectionism and capitalist nationalism emanating
from the non-imperial or backward industries, chiefly from
the smaller manufacturers among them.’
- that ‘no major of whatever internal economic structure
sits idly by while another power masses its forces for an
attack on its industry ... On the two previous occasions in
this century when major national capitalisms have entered
into major export conflicts, the “competition” between them
necessarily rapidly escalates into protectionism, embargos,
financial blockades, colonial wars, and finally the First
and Second World Wars ... The threat which Mandel depicts,
if it had the magnitude he ascribes to it, would clearly be
a casus belli.’
- that ‘Mandel’s procedure of equating the economic sphere
of US capital with the territorial area of the USA is highly
misleading ... The sphere of US capital is not confined to
the territorial nation, but of course extends in varying
degrees throughout Canada, Japan, the states of Europe and
the Third World.’
- that US banking capital is ‘predominant’. ‘The role of
banks in competitive battles is crucial, and becomes more so
as the production advantages of one antagonist over the
other diminish ... The ability of European industry to force
a crisis on US industry thus depends on the relative
strength of the respective privately-controlled capital
reserves and credits ... These financial powers are based in
US imperialism.’
At first glance, these arguments are at least partially in
contradiction with each other and self-eliminating. If all
‘major corporations’ systematically and definitively resist
pressures toward protectionism and capitalist nationalism, how
can one then explain that ‘major export conflicts’, which
Nicolaus modestly assigns to ‘major national capitalisms’ but in
reality have always involved major monopolistic corporations and
imperialist powers, could break out at all? Was it perhaps
‘smaller manufacturers’, and not Messrs. Krupp and Thyssen,
Vickers-Armstrong and Deterding, Morgan and Rockefeller, who
were responsible for the First and Second World Wars? If the
economic spheres of influence of imperialism are not tied up
with national state powers (the notion of ‘territoriality’ is
dragged in here by the hair; what is involved is the key role of
states in these conflicts!), how can one then explain the very
same ‘protectionism, embargos, financial blockades, colonial
wars and First and Second World Wars’ we have been talking about?
Is capital export and foreign capital investment a ‘new’
phenomenon? Wasn’t it already well developed before and during
the First World War – so much so in fact that innumerable
liberal pacifists and opportunist Social-Democrats were
convinced that imperialist wars would become impossible?
[10] How can US banking
capital be ‘predominant’ – i.e. US imperialism control most of
the financial resources of the world – and at the same time,
firstly be forced to ‘neutralize’ the reduction of productive
advantage of US capitalists (where did the European and Japanese
capitalists get the capital for financing their huge outlays of
productive investment? They didn’t borrow them from US bankers!)
and secondly be increasingly dependent for borrowing capital on
the European capital market?
Nicolaus also alleges that the wage-costs of American
corporations should be calculated on ‘world averages’, given the
fact they transfer a growing part of their operations abroad. In
this, he seems to have lost his sense of proportion. What is the
fraction of total output of US industry produced abroad in
competition withus units of production at home – excluding
activities complementary to domestic production, such as oil
extraction? Obviously, only a marginal proportion. What is the
fraction of total manpower employed by US industry beyond the
frontiers of the USA? Again, only a marginal one. Indeed, if US
monopolies were ever to succeed in transferring 30, 40 or 50 per
cent of their output of, say, automobiles, computers, airplanes
and turbines, this could only lead to a massive increase of
unemployment in the USA itself. What would be the consequence
(and purpose) of this unemployment? To erode the wage
differentials between the USA and Europe (or even the USA and
Japan) by lowering the standard of living of the American
working class. Why would US monopolies ever embark on such a
course in the first place, if not under the compulsion of
international competition?
The methodological toots of Nicolaus’s mistakes lie in an
inability to distinguish quantitative from qualitative changes,
relative from absolute superiority, the beginning from the final
outcome of a process. They are connected with a gross
underestimation of the State as the major instrument of defence
of the capitalist class interests today (against their class
enemies, against foreign competitors, and against the menacingly
explosive nature of the inner contradictions of the system).
The relationship of forces between various imperialist powers
can develop greatly to the advantage of one and at the expense
of another. A massive relative superiority on the European
continent was possessed by Germany, in the periods 1900-1916,
and 1937-1944, and by France in the period 1919-1923. But that
does not transform the competitors of the predominant power into
semi-colonial nations, which have lost control over the means of
production of their country. Such semicolonial nations only
arise when in fact the key industries and banks in the country
are owned or controlled by foreign capitalists, and when for
that reason, the State itself fundamentally protects the
interests of the foreign imperialist class, as against those of
the ‘native’ bourgeoisie. That is the situation in Greece,
Brazil, Ghana or Iran today. It is obviously not the situation
in France, Britain or Italy, not to speak of Japan or Western
Germany. Quantitative changes in the relationship of forces
between imperialist powers are one thing; a qualitative change
in status, the transformation of an imperialist country into a
semicolonial country (as could have happened in France, if
Germany had won the Second World War, or as could have happened
in West Germany, if the 1945-47 trend had been maintained and
the ‘Cold War’ had not broken out) is quite another thing. There
is not the slightest evidence to show that US imperialism
controls more than 10 per cent of the industrial means of
production, and much less of the financial means of exchange, of
any other imperialist power (with the exception of Canada, which
is indeed a border case). There is for that reason not the
slightest evidence that these powers have lost their basic
independence as imperialist powers, and have become US
semi-colonies.
In fact, if one studies the evolution of the
inter-relationship of forces between US imperialism and its main
foreign competitors, one has to conclude that the USA reached
the zenith of its power at the end of the Second World War, and
that its hegemony has ever since been in decline. Of course, it
still retains a great relative superiority. This relative
superiority might even increase again, if there is no sufficient
international interpenetration of capital on a European scale,
if ‘European’ multinational corporations are not established for
systematic competition with US-based ‘multinational
corporations’ on relatively equal terms. But independent
ownership of capital, independent control of the ‘internal
market’ and independent use of State power, are still basic
characteristics of European and Japanese imperialists.
[11]
But what about US military superiority? What of the
possibility of new inter-imperialist wars? US military
superiority over its main competitors is, indeed, much more
striking than its relative economic superiority. But precisely
because there has come about a contradiction between the
resurgence of independent financial and industrial power of
Western European and Japanese imperialism, and their continuous
military dependence on the USA, the NATO and Nippo-American
alliances are in deep and permanent crisis. There is only one
way in which this crisis can be solved, in the long run (inasmuch
as imperialism survives and the present trend in relationship of
forces is not fundamentally altered): an adaptation of the
military relationship of forces to economic reality, the
re-emergence of independent military strength in Western Europe
and Japan – in the last analysis, the emergence of independent
‘nuclear deterrents’ in Western Europe (Franco-British, or
Franco-German-British, or even on a broader scale) and Japan.
As for new inter-imperialist wars, which the late Joseph
Stalin predicted in his political testament, they are indeed
extremely unlikely to break out, but not for reasons of US
supremacy, but because all imperialist powers are threatened by
a much more deadly menace then inter-imperialist competition:
the menace of the non-capitalist part of the world expanding
through new victorious revolutions. Against the so-called
‘socialist countries’ and new revolutions, imperialist powers
indeed have an attitude of collective solidarity, which makes
the NATO and Nippo-American alliances real alliances, in the
common interest of the capitalist class everywhere, and not
simply stooge sets for US expansion.
Imperialist competition continues, and will continue,
including some very ruthless developments indeed; but it will
unfurl within the framework of that collective solidarity
towards the common enemy. Yet within that framework, the law of
uneven development continues to operate inexorably, causing the
relative decline of previously supreme powers and the emergence
of newly strengthened imperialist forces. The fate of US
imperialism’s supremacy will be decided neither on the
battle-field nor in the ‘Third World’ – at least in the coming
years. [12] It will be
decided by the capacity of Western European imperialists (and
Japanese imperialists) to set up colossal corporations,
equivalent in financial power and industrial strength to that of
their US competitors. I do not say that this development has
already taken place on a sufficient scale or that it is
inevitable. I have elsewhere made clear the obstacles and
resistances towards that process. I only state that, if it takes
place, it will force US imperialism greatly to intensify the
exploitation of the American working class, under the pressure
of competition.
The discussion on ‘ultra-imperialism’ is, in fact, an old one.
It was initiated by Kautsky after the outbreak of the First
World War, and received at that time a scathing reply by Lenin.
It was revived during the mid-’twenties by various
Social-Democrats (Hilferding, Vandervelde and others),
celebrating the constitution of the world steel cartel as a
triumph of ‘ultra-imperialism’ and ‘peaceful development’; the
rebuff which history inflicted a few years later to that
illusion is still well known by everybody.
Lenin’s answer to the fallacy of ‘ultra-imperialism’ can be
summarized in one formula: the law of uneven development.
‘It is sufficient to pose the question clearly to see
that the answer can only be negative. For one couldn’t
conceive, under capitalism, any other basis for the division
in zones of influence, of interests, of colonies etc., than
the strength of the participants of that partition, their
economic, financial, military strength etc. Now among these
participants of partition, that strength changes in a
different way, for under capitalism, even development of
enterprises, of trusts, of industries, of countries, is
impossible.’</>
Lenin adds:
‘But if one speaks about the “purely economic” conditions
of the epoch of finance capital, as about a concrete
historical epoch situated in the beginning of the XXth
century, the best answer to the dead abstractions about “ultra-imperialism”...
is to oppose to them the concrete economic reality of the
present-day world economy. Kautsky’s theory of
ultra-imperialism is completely void of meaning and can only,
among other things, encourage the deeply mistaken idea ...
that the domination of finance capital reduces the
inequalities and contradictions of the world economy,
whereas in reality it strengthens them.’
[13]
The developments of the last year – to go no further into the
recent past – are a perfect illustration of the fact that the
law of uneven and combined development, ‘strengthening the
inequalities and contradiction of the world economy’, operates
today as it operated 50 years ago. In 1958, West Germany’s
exports of machinery and transport equipment amounted to $3.9
billion, those of the United States amounted to $6.3 billion, 62
per cent more than the West German figure. In 1968, West German
exports of machinery and transport equipment had risen to $11.3
billion, as against $14.5 billion by USA; the difference had
declined to less than 30 per cent. In 1969, the two figures will
practically meet at somewhere near $15 billion. Total West
German exports were half of US exports in 1958; in 1969, they
will amount to more than two-thirds of that figure.
This industrial power is by no means without relation to
capital accumulation and financial strength. The revaluation of
the Deutsche Mark (in fact: the devaluation of the dollar
compared to the main European currency) is correlated with a
tremendous export of German capital. Net long-term private
capital export was $1 billion in 1967; $2.4 billion in 1968 and
probably more than $5 billion – at the new exchange rate – in
1969, i.e. already more in absolute figures than US capital
exports! In fact, during the first semester of 1969 there were
more bonds issued in dm (including by US corporations) than in
dollars, on the international capital market.
The sapping of the dollar’s strength by foreign military
outlays has so changed the financial relationship of forces in
favour of other major imperialist powers, that the US government
now undertakes systematic efforts to force them... to spend more
on rearmament (i.e. to redivide and so the speak
‘internationalize’ the common burden of defending the ‘borders
of the capitalist world’). But this is inconceivable without a
military strengthening of these powers (the strengthening of
Japan is now on the agenda, after that of Western Germany),
which again shifts the inter-imperialist relationship of forces
at the expense of US imperialism.
5. The Politics of the Debate
The most astonishing passages of Martin Nicolaus’s polemic
are these in which he accuses me of ‘making sense’ only if I
assume the ‘pacification’ of the Soviet Union, a military
alliance between European capital and the ussr, and ‘peaceful
coexistence’. In other words, he seems to imply that ‘beneath
Mandel lies de Gaulle’. Here we have again a typical example of
how Martin Nicolaus is led astray by operating too much with
metaphysical abstractions, instead of understanding real,
contradictory social forces at work and in conflict with each
other.
The competition between Western European and US imperialism
is a fact, visible for anybody who studies not only trade
statistics but polemics and debates in all capitalist circles on
both sides of the Atlantic. What did ‘Gaullism’ represent in
this debate? An attempt to ‘strengthen’ Western European
imperialism by outmoded techniques of 19th-century diplomacy
(18th-century dynastic diplomacy would perhaps be a more
correct, if more severe assessment, at that). The attempt to
establish ‘European independence’ under the hegemony of one of
its economically weakest imperialist powers, France, was
condemned to fail, ‘independent’ deterrent or not, as I pointed
out in the early ’sixties. It could only lead to a deterioration
of the relative position of French imperialism as compared with
German and Italian imperialism, for the capital squandered by
De-Gaulle in his force de frappe determined a growing
antiquation of French industrial equipment compared to Italian
and German plant and a growing exacerbations of social tensions
in France itself. His attempt at a diplomatic and economic
flirtation with Moscow was equally condemned to failure, because
over and above the obvious importance of commercial expansion
towards Eastern Europe, common to all European capitalists (and
for which German, British and Italian groups were often better
equipped than their French competitors), there was the staunch
class consciousness of the French bourgeoisie, which could not
but consider the Soviet Union, in spite of all the conservatism
of its leaders and the reformism of the French CP, as a class
enemy with whom no alliance was possible in the present world
context.
In fact, the only durable change which occurred in the French
economy under de Gaulle, occurred in spite of de Gaulle: it was
the constantly growing integration of France into the Common
Market. Today, 45 per cent of French exports are directed to
these countries, as against 22 per cent before 1958. This
economic fact was strong enough to create so much opposition
inside the French bourgeoisie against de Gaulle’s particular
views on capitalist Western European integration that it
actually caused his downfall. I predicted this years ago in the
same way as I predicted that de Gaulle was blindly working
pour le roi de Prusse, for German hegemony in a Common
Market limited to six countries.
Now what is the main social and political ideology of the
advocates of ‘European independence’ in Western European
capitalist and pettybourgeois circles? Is it Mandel’s thesis of
inter-imperialist competition? Not at all! It is an ideology
very close indeed to that of Martin Nicolaus and the thesis of ‘ultra-imperialism’.
Europe is ‘in danger of being colonized by the USA’. This
colonization is ‘irresistible’, unless Europe unites. In my book
on the Common Market, shortly to appear in English, I have
exposed the ideological function of this propaganda: it is to
use the endemic ‘anti-Americanism’ of the European working class
as a means to tune down the class struggle in Europe, to disarm
this working class against capital concentration and capitalist
rationalization, and to collaborate with its own exploiters
against the ‘common enemy’: US imperialism.
The idea of complete US imperialist supremacy on a world
scale, and the idea of Western Europe and Japan being slowly but
surely reduced to the status of semi-colonial powers, logically
leads to such conclusions. For after all doesn’t
Marxism-Leninism teach that there is a basic difference between
an inter-imperialist conflict, and a conflict between an
imperialist power and an oppressed and exploited semicolonial
bourgeoisie? So it is the theory of absolute US hegemony which
leads to capitulation before the class enemy and to class
collaboration, and not at all the classical Leninist concept of
inter-imperialist competition, which I continue to uphold. This
theoretical prediction has already been borne out in practice,
at least twice: in the early ’fifties, when the French CP (and,
to a lesser degree, other CPs in Western Europe) were making a
block with Gaullists and speaking on the same platform with them
against ‘US imperialism’ and the ‘abandonment of national
sovereignty’, as if France were a semi-colonial power, and not
one competing gang in the international brotherhood of robber
barons and imperialists plunderers; and in the early ’sixties,
when, starting from that very same assumption, certain Maoist
groups proposed to support De Gaulle in the Presidential
elections against Mitterrand, using the justification that de
Gaulle was ‘more anti-American than Mitterrand’.
Our theory, at the contrary, does not lead to the
subordination of any sector of the international working class
to any sector of world capitalism. We stand for independent
class struggle of the working class in all capitalist countries,
We stand for independent organisation of the working class,
defending its own class interests and bent upon a socialist
revolution. We do not preach to American workers that they
should ‘ally’ themselves with any sector of the ruling class,
nor do we propose anything of the kind to European workers. To
say that bourgeois ideas lie underneath such a clear strategy of
independent working-class struggle is somewhat preposterous.
There is a lot in Martin Nicolaus’ article with which we can
agree. There is no doubt that we are living in an epoch of
tremendous ‘socialization’ and ‘internationalization’ of
productive forces, on a scale unexpected even by Lenin or in
Lenin’s time. [14] There
is no doubt that the basic contradiction in such an epoch is the
contradiction between capital and labour, in the process of
production itself, and that the direct road of the working class
towards a socialist revolution in the industrialized imperialist
countries will be not through a fight for wages, but through
objective challenges against capitalist relations of production.
We have been writing this for many years, and there is no reason
to assume that this will not be true in the United States too.
It is also evident that the very supremacy of US imperialism
at the end of the Second World War tended to involve the ruling
class of the USA with all world contradictions of imperialism,
and tended to introduce all these contradictions in some form
into American society Itself. In spite of all its accumulated
wealth and reserves, even US imperialism has proved itself
unable in the long run to pay, at one and the same time, the
costs of playing world gendarme, of introducing ‘reforms’ into
US society in order to avoid an exacerbation of social tensions,
and of financing a constant modernization of equipment to assure
a rate of productive capital accumulation which would enable it
to maintain its technological advance on all its competitors. It
is obvious that the origin of all the strains and tensions,
increasingly visible in US society since the early sixties, are
linked to world developments. We ourselves have pointed out many
times how great the impact of the colonial revolution and of the
Vietnamese war has been on the formation of a new revolutionary
youth vanguard in the USA, on the politicization of the Blacks,
on the emergence of a new radicalism among intellectuals,
technicians and public service employees. So we see no reason
suddenly to deny these evidences now. One should add that a new
wave of objectively revolutionary militancy of the West European
working class, as well as militant struggles of Eastern European
workers, students and intellectuals for socialist democracy –
not to speak of a parallel rise of political revolution in the
ussr – could not fail likewise to strengthen the rise of a new
revolutionary vanguard and an upsurge of mass radicalism in the
USA.
All these factors – as well as many of those which Nicolaus
cites – contribute to shake the relative political and social
stability of the USA, to stir up against class consciousness in
advanced American workers, and to facilitate the eruption of a
sweeping radicalization and massive class struggles of the
proletariat in that country. But all these subjective factors,
reacting from the social superstructure on class relations,
cannot be the main cause of a new mass radicalization of that
working class. The main cause can only be found in a change of
material conditions. The growing crisis of American imperialism
can only transform itself into a decisive crisis of American
society through the mediation of a growing instability of the
American economy. This is our key thesis. In this growing
instability of the American economy, the loss of US suzerainty
over the whole imperialist world, the relative decline of US
economic superiority vis-`-vis its imperialist competitors, and
the sharpening competition and redivision of the international
capitalist market – of which the internal market of the USA is
the most important single sector – will play an important role.
In ‘Where is America going?’ I did not predict that the
‘re-emergence of the contradiction between labour and capital in
the USA’ would present itself ‘as a re-run of some textbook
accounts of the contract-bargaining sessions between Reuther and
GM’. I only predicted that the American working class, which
today has trade-unionist but not socialist class consciousness,
would become radicalized from the moment the capitalist system
showed itself less and less able to ‘deliver the goods’, i.e. to
guarantee regular increases in real wages and a high level of
employment. For I argued that the relative stability of American
society during the past 30 years was basically not due to some
ideological factor (the alleged anti-communism of the working
class) but to this capacity of the system to ‘deliver the goods’.
Nicolaus agrees with me that this capacity is now declining, and
that the roots of that decline are to be found in the
deterioration of the world situation of American imperialism. It
is hard to deny, under these conditions, that the weakening of
the competitive position of US imperialism on the world market
has something to do with that deterioration.
December 5 1969
Notes
1.
In the first paragraph of Where is America going? –
NLR 54, p.3.
2. The latest attempt to
give a supposedly Marxist rationalization to ‘Third Worldism’
has been offered by Pierre Jalée in his book
L’imperialisms en 1970 (Maspero, Paris 1969). This is
based on the assumption that the contradiction between
imperialism and the peoples of the Third World is the ‘main
contradiction’ today (one can see here the havoc this
undialectical formula of Lin Piao has caused among sincere and
capable Marxists), while workers’ actions in the West remain
‘reformist’, both because of the capacity of the system to
guarantee for a long time to come a high rate of growth (declining
fluctuations of the industrial cycle and a low level of
unemployment) and because of the predominance of rightist forces
in the labour movement. How this theory can be reconciled with
the reality of the class struggles in France May 1968 and Italy
1969, which obviously tend more and more to outgrow the limits
of reformism and to challenge capitalist relations of
production, or with the reality of the world economy,
characterized since 1965 by a declining rate of growth, an
increase in unemployment, and the appearance in nearly all key
sectors of industry of growing over-capacity of production, is
hard for me to understand.
3. It is useful to stress
that Trotsky rejected any notion that the peoples of the
underdeveloped world had to ‘wait’ till the Western proletariat
made its revolution, just as he opposed any ‘Third-World’
illusions. In his political testament, the May 1940
Manifesto of the Fourth International on The Imperialist War and
the Proletarian Revolution, he wrote:
‘The perspective of permanent revolution in no case signifies
that the backward countries must await the signal from the
advanced ones, or that the colonial peoples should patiently
wait for the proletariat of the metropolitan centres to free
them. Help comes to him who helps himself. Workers must develop
the revolutionary struggle in every country, colonial or
imperialist, where favourable conditions have been established,
and through this set an example for the workers of other
countries.’
It will interest our readers that this was not a new position
of Trotsky’s, only acquired after the sad experiences of
European working-class defeats in the ‘thirties. As early as
August 5th, 1919, in a secret message to the Central Committee
of the Russian Communist Party, he wrote as follows:
‘There is no doubt at all that our Red Army constitutes an
incomparably more powerful force in the Asian terrain of world
politics than in the European terrain. Here there opens up
before us an undoubted possibility not merely of a lengthy wait
to see how events develop in Europe, but of conducting activity
in the Asian field. The road to India may prove at the given
moment to be more readily passable and shorter for us than the
road to Soviet Hungary. The sort of army which at the moment can
be of no great significance in the European scales can upset the
unstable balance of Asian relationships of colonial dependence,
give a direct push to an uprising on the part of the oppressed
masses and assure the triumph of such a rising in Asia.’ (The
Trotsky Papers, I, 1917-22, p.623, The Hague 1964).
4. Lenin, Œuvres,
tome 29, pp.167-8, Editions Sociales, Paris, 1962 – my
own translation.
5. When I speak of
relative quiescence I do not deny that there have been strikes
during these decades. But obviously, nothing occurred on the
scale of the post-war strikes, not to speak of the 1936-37
sit-down wave.
6. Engels: England
1845 and 1885, article published in Commonweal,
March 1, 1885 – I quote from Marx-Engels Werke,
vol.21, pp.196-7, Dietz-Verlag, Berlin 1962, and have
retranslated the text myself from German into English.
7. This applies of course
only to private capital outflows. I do not have to deal here
with the phenomenon of the so-called ‘public help to Third-World
countries’ – in fact the creation, by the imperialist states, of
purchasing power for the heavy industry export monopolies of
their own countries.
8. According to figures
quoted by E.L. Nelson and F. Cutler in The International
Investment Position of the United States in 1967 (Survey
of Current Business, vol.48, no.10, 1968, pp.24-25),
the rate of profit calculated by capitalist firms on USA direct
capital investment in 1967 amounted to 12.3 per cent in
Latin-America, 14 per cent in Asia and 19.7 per cent in Africa,
as against only 10.1 per cent for direct capital investments in
imperialist countries (Canada, Western Europe, Australia).
9. It should be noted
that, after having poked fun at me in the beginning of his
article for using the categories of ‘technological revolution’,
and ‘inflation’ to explain some of the causes of growing
instability in American society, Nicolaus comes back to exactly
the same factors when he projects, in part IV of his article,
the ‘development of a general crisis of overproduction’. We can
easily drop the ‘backlog of unfulfilled demand created by the
devastation of the Second World War’; by no stretch of
imagination can this explain a seven or eight-year boom in the
US economy in the ’sixties. He is then left with only two
explanations: (i) ‘No epoch-making technological innovations’
have materialized, which would imply that the high rate of
expansion of the last two decades was due after all
‘epoch-making technological innovations’ in the electronics,
nuclear energy, petrochemical and computer industries as I
contended. (ii) ‘Both investment and demand become problematic
without the artificial and necessarily temporary stimulus of
inflation’. Let’s not start a dispute as to the ‘necessarily
temporary’ character of inflation. But its key role in attempts
to avoid a major crisis of over-production I pointed out long
ago (see Marxist Economic Theory, vol.II,
pp.526-36, Merlin Press, London 1968).
10. ‘While imperialism
necessitates a war of capitalists of one country against those
of all (?) other countries, it is unable to realise such a war.
The imperialists of each big power were forced ... to arrive at
an understanding with the imperialists of another, or several
other big powers, and to conclude an alliance with them. But by
doing so, they have already started on the road of a very
important modification of imperialism itself ... It is not at
all excluded that the present war will end with an understanding
between the leading big powers of both camps for the partition
and exploitation of the world. We have even to take into account
the possibility that the world will see the spectacle, of which
we should be ashamed, that the imperialist International will
become a reality sooner than the International of the socialist
parties.’ Karl Kautsky, Die Neue Zeit, February
16th, 1917.
11. All this is
explained in much more detail in my forthcoming Europe
versus America? – Contradictions of Imperialism (NLB).
12. I mean by this
that the economic repercussions of Third World liberation
movements in the coming years cannot by themselves cause a major
upheaval in the US economy. In fact, during the last 20 years
these movements, which implied the loss for capitalism of the
biggest country in the world – China – as a field of capital
investment, coincided with a big increase in the rate of growth
of the imperialist economy. This does, not of course, mean that
the political, social and subjective effects of Third World
liberation struggles do not make a very important contribution
to shaking the equilibrium of imperialist society.
13. Lenin:
Œuvres Choisies, I, pp.874, 852-3, Editions en Langues
Etrangères, Moscou 1946.
14. But Nicolaus is
mistaken when he assumes that national boundaries and nation
States have ceased to be obstacles for this movement of
internationalization of capital. On the contrary: the more this
movement increases, the stronger becomes the contradiction
between the survival of the nation state and the tendency of
productive forces to outgrow it. Nicolaus shows a similar
inability to understand the contradictory, dialectical process
of social change, in his polemic on the question of black
employment. My figure of the reduction of unskilled jobs in the
USA comes from Secretary of Labour Wirtz, (quoted in
Baran-Sweezy: Monopoly Capital, p.267, Monthly
Review Press, 1966). The official statistics of black employment
in 1960 3.6 million employed. Of these only 1 million were
unskilled labourers (among which a quarter of a million farm
laborers), as against 887,000 semi-skilled workers, 357,000
craftsmen and foremen, and 292,000 technicians, professionals
and clerically employed. The basic process in American industry
has been to displace labourers by semi-skilled operatives. But
at the same time, in the American economy clerical jobs, and
jobs of technicians and professionals, have risen even more
quickly (the number of professional, technical and clerical jobs
increased from 11·7 million in 1940 to 21 millions in 1965,
whereas the number of ‘semi-skilled operatives and kindred
workers’ only rose from 9·5 to 14 millions). So it is perfectly
possible that, at one and the same time, there are many fewer
jobs as labourers, there are many more blacks employed in
industry and services as semi-skilled operatives, there are
proportionally many more black unemployed than white and there
is a growing inter-racial income gap and occupational
segregation, which has a powerful radicalizing impact on the
black population. |